{"id":878,"date":"2024-03-18T11:22:18","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T11:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/03\/18\/universal-suffrage\/"},"modified":"2024-03-18T11:22:18","modified_gmt":"2024-03-18T11:22:18","slug":"universal-suffrage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/03\/18\/universal-suffrage\/","title":{"rendered":"Universal Suffrage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">I <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2024\/03\/resuming-the-never-trump-mentality-thread.html\">wrote<\/a>, on 4 March,&#0160;<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">The war is over the soul of America.&#0160; The question concerns whether we should (i) preserve what remains of America as she was founded to be, and (ii)&#0160;<em>restore<\/em>&#0160;those good elements of the system bequeathed to us by the Founders, while (iii) preserving the legitimate progress that has been made (e.g. universal suffrage), OR whether we should&#0160;<em>replace<\/em>&#0160;the political system of the Founders with an incompatible system which can be described as culturally Marxist.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">As I was writing clause (iii) I realized that some to my Right, people I consider friends, whose intellect and judgment I respect, and with whom I agree on many fundamentals, would take issue with my endorsement of universal suffrage. They are against it. Two points in response.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">The first is that the 19th Amendment, ratified 18 August 1920, will never be overturned.&#0160; The Amendment states, &quot;The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.&quot; And so the question whether female citizens should have the right to vote, while of historical and theoretical interest, has no practical importance whatsoever.&#0160;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">The second point is that, even if it could be overturned, it ought not be. Now I concede to my friends on the Right that women as <em>as a group<\/em> are not as politically astute as men <em>as a group.<\/em>&#0160; Their political judgment is inferior to that of men. This is a fact, and a fact is a fact whether you like it or not. We conservatives stand on the <em>terra firma<\/em> of a reality antecedent to human wishes and dreams.&#0160;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">What I have just asserted is enough to bring down the wrath of&#0160; many feminists upon my head. They will hurl the &#39;sexist&#39; epithet at me. And I will reply: It can&#39;t be sexist if it is true, and it <em>is<\/em> true.&#0160; This is a special case of a general principle: It cannot be X-ist if it is true.&#0160; Candidate substituends for the variable include &#39;age,&#39; &#39;race,&#39; &#39;species,&#39; &#39;able,&#39; and others. Particularly knuckleheaded is the accusation of &#39;ableism.&#39;&#0160;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">I have said enough to establish my conservative bona fides.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">Why shouldn&#39;t the 19th Amendment be overturned?<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">Yesterday, on C-SPAN, I watched Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) rake Christopher Wray, FBI Director, over the coals. She did a superb job, a job as good as any man could do. So I put the question to my friends on the Right: Do you think that Stefanik should not have the right to vote and participate in the political life of the country?<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">To nail down my point, here is a list, off the top of my head, in no particular order, of just a few females&#0160; who are lot better politically than a lot of men I could mention:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, K. T. McFarland, Tulsi Gabbard, Riley Gaines, Candace Owens, Mollie Hemingway, Tammy Bruce, Faulkner Harris, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dianawest.net\/\">Diane West<\/a>, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Heather MacDonald.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">Will the friends to my Right dismiss these women as wholly unrepresentative outliers? Do they have arguments? What might they be?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote, on 4 March,&#0160; The war is over the soul of America.&#0160; The question concerns whether we should (i) preserve what remains of America as she was founded to be, and (ii)&#0160;restore&#0160;those good elements of the system bequeathed to us by the Founders, while (iii) preserving the legitimate progress that has been made (e.g. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/03\/18\/universal-suffrage\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Universal Suffrage&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[394,70,16,304],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism","category-men-and-women","category-u-s-constitution","category-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}